In AA meetings, we are urged to “look for the similarities not the differences”. Watching People, Places, Things, I didn’t need to look hard, the parallels between my own life and the story onstage were obvious

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.

The American industrialist Henry Ford is famous for inventing the Model T Ford, the world’s first affordable mass produced car. The Model T Ford was not Henry Ford’s most astonishing invention.

In 1914, Ford shocked the world by announcing that he was raising the rate of pay in his plants to $5 an hour. This more than doubled his workers’ wages. At the same time, Ford decided to limit the number of hours that his workers were allowed to work. Initially, he limited his workers to six eight hour shifts from Monday to Saturday, which he further reduced in 1926 to five eight hour shifts from Monday to Friday. In doing so, Ford invented both the modern conception of the working week and the idea of leisure time.

Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things is an unusual play because we see the events of the story subjectively, though the eyes of its main character, Emma. We experience the world as she experiences it. When Emma takes drugs, the lights glow brighter and voices slow down. People seem to become other people. Objects disappear and reappear unexpectedly. When her experience of events becomes fragmented, the action of the play becomes fragmented. We see her world from the inside, as opposed to seeing the reality of the events that she is experiencing from the outside.

In 1979, while living in New York, David Hare met Tennessee Williams. The two writers soon became good friends. In this extract from his new memoir The Blue Touch Paper, David Hare remembers and reflects upon their friendship.

What are possible relationships between text and performance? Some sixty years ago the British philosopher Raymond Williams, troubled by the way in which the development of print had turned a moving and open art into something ‘relatively static’, discerned four potential relationships between the words on the page and their potential staging.